Media Use in the Middle East

About

For the past three years, the talented team at Northwestern University in Qatar (NUQ) has commissioned a six-nation survey about media use in the Middle East. To show trends in media usage among Arab countries, this annual survey culls results from more than 6,000 respondents throughout Egypt, Lebanon, Qatar, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates.

With extensive survey results and no way to easily share their findings with the public, NUQ reached out to create a website with interactive data explorations for further user examination. We’ve been honored to partner with NUQ on this comprehensive project for all three years, eagerly enjoying getting to work on such a vast undertaking in new and exciting ways. The challenges and rewards in this year’s project proved no different.

Challenge

In creating the website and interactives, the main challenge is always finding an intuitive way to represent more than 10,000,000 cells of data for researchers, journalists, and members of the academic community to easily comprehend.

What We Built

A microsite housing different chapters of the survey, highlighting an editorial write-up of the key findings of the survey

About 65 mini graphics containing single-chart visualizations to showcase singular findings in an engaging and shareable way

Photography

Revised Homepage

This year, we decided to revise the previous homepage by adding a more intuitive system of jump links and more engaging photography. Our goal was to create a central area that helped readers quickly understand the website's pathways and navigate to relevant content.

Website Navigation

Thinking through the navigation was critical to best integrate the written content and interactive aspects of this microsite. Global navigation is located in the left rail, with contextual navigation displayed in the right rail of the interactive tool.

02

Interactive Data Tool

With more than 10,000,000 cells of data, we needed to create something intuitive for users to understand without hindering performance. The interactive tool was created to help users explore all responses to the survey.

Survey Question Menu

Users can select each of the survey questions from the right-hand navigation to view results.

Dynamic Filtering Capabilities

Demographic information is displayed as filtering options, which users can apply to refine their search to target a specific population.

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Single-Chart Microcontent

In order to visually showcase some of the key findings of the survey, we helped create approximately 65 pieces of microcontent. These visuals are single-chart graphics that focus on concise, straightforward, and specific findings. They help to highlight individual key points in the survey results.

High Five

By building an engaging, responsive site for this research project, we’ve been able to make the findings both accessible and useful to industry leaders, policymakers, journalists, and students of media around the world. The interactive that empowers users to explore the data according their own interests provides a nearly limitless resource of information.